Parallels between Mira Nair’s films and Zohran Mamdani’s politics, an irreverent ’90s trans punk zine, the millennia-long history of fan fiction, Ms. Rachel’s dress, and more in this week’s Required Reading.

The US can’t make up its mind about a Venice Biennale representative, the Studio Museum reopens in a beautiful new building, the Philadelphia Art Museum suddenly dismissed its director and CEO, and more art news in this week’s Art Movements.

Art schools are marketed as gateways to success. But Damien Davis argues that most leave with loans, little security, and skills that don’t match the marketplace.

Even laid flat, the collars on Carmen Argote’s artworks bob up. It’s like a magician went out to an orchard and performed a massive vanishing act, and the laborers left their uniforms behind. Except now, the magicians are ICE agents, and the workers might never return to the audience’s applause.

In this week’s A View From the Easel, artists turn floors into paintings and discarded items into works of art.

Nearly four decades after they came together, a Chilean indie band’s self-titled debut, “María Sonora,” has finally been formally released — an event marked by their first live gig in 31 years.

The MoMA PS1 is being sued by a visitor who suffered from a concussion and lasting medical problems after a wall-mounted panel at the museum fell and struck her in 2022.

Not one work in the exhibition “Global Fascisms” at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt acknowledges the world burning just beyond the door. In Jara Nassar’s words, “What is the role of art when the world is on fire?”

Three free speech groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, have accused a nonprofit museum, History Colorado Center, of censoring an artwork that contained pro-Palestine symbols and criticism of ICE.

The Studio Museum in Harlem has a new, stunning home. The 57-year-old New York institution, dedicated to artists of African descent, inaugurated its new building in a press preview ahead of its grand public reopening next Saturday.

Xin Wang’s pastel drawings include skulls, dancing women, frenzied worshippers, goddesses, and lovers who wished to exist outside of law and propriety, to live carnally on the edge of chaos.

“We’re tackling that tech utopian idea of 1950s California, where it was considered progress to convert rivers into concrete canals and computerize the distribution of water, and no one really questioned this.” —Rowan Wernham, director of “Pistachio Wars”

In Memoriam this week, we’re honoring Alison Knowles, the first woman of Fluxus; Jackie Ferrara, who contained chaos in geometric forms; John Adams Griffin, abstract painter and Color Field pioneer; and Mitchell D. Kahan, former director of the Akron Art Museum.

“I am still in ecstasy over this,” said artist Molly Crabapple in an interview about Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City.

Beyond the ballot box, Mayor Mamdani memes are another way the people have spoken — from Shakira Law to Zohran fan edits, to a newly reignited hope for dating in New York City.

Our monthly list of opportunities is a resource for artists and creatives seeking funding and community support to further their work.

After an emergency board meeting at the Philadelphia Art Museum, Director and CEO Sasha Suda was ousted via email, three years into her five-year contract with the museum and less than a month into the institution’s controversial rebrand.

The promise of change drives creativity everywhere. It’s no surprise that most neighborhoods where artists and the creative community live in New York City voted overwhelmingly for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

“Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages” at The Met Cloisters is a counterargument to pop culture depictions of the Middle Ages, dominated by cisgender regulations and gender-normative binaries.

At the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Sammy Baloji evokes traces of forgotten splendor in his copper and bronze negatives of 17th- and 18th-century textiles from the Kongo Kingdom.

Our monthly list of opportunities is a resource for artists and creatives seeking funding and community support to further their work.

Lisa Yuskavage’s divisive drawings, Sarah K. Khan’s unruly women from the African, Arab, and Asian worlds, Destiny Mata’s love letter to the Lower East Side, and more art to see in New York City this week.

If you’ve been staring at a costume for a tad too long, trying to figure out what it could be, then the chances are you’ve had a close encounter with Gay Halloween.

The Baja California edge-land, an arbitrary and contested frontier, has been a lifelong obsession for Julio César Morales, an artist who’s explored the border’s violent and complex realities in poetic form for over 30 years.

Test your knowledge of Surrealism in the latest Art Crossword, full of furry things that shouldn’t be furry, floating apples, and more.

“Observed rituals give us a cultural framework in which to mourn the dead, but they are also there to stop us being pulled down into the earth with our beloved dead at our rawest moment of grief.” —Roger Luckhurt, author of Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead

NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, Working Families Party Co-director Ana María Archila, and City Councilmember Shahana Hanif on Zohran Mamdani’s position on arts and culture: hyperallergic.com/1054651/live...

How is New York City’s cultural community voting, feeling, and reacting? Get the latest in our live updates on the mayoral election: bit.ly/3Jlfnmy

“A pro-union mayor who sits down with laid-off workers, goes on hunger strike with taxi drivers, shows up to every picket line, consistently demonstrates an understanding of the human cost of work — that is the ally we need in City Hall.” —June Lei, Secretary of DC37 Local 1502

Before the grand opening of Princeton’s new art museum, its longtime director, James Steward, began to feel emotional. “How many times do you get to open a new museum from the ground up in your career? Once every 100 years?” he said. “I’ve been yearning to have the public back.”

“As a visual artist, I want to live in the city I love and actually afford it instead of constantly feeling like I’m being priced out.” —Samhita Kamisetty

Drop your “I Voted” selfies and favorite memes, tell us what’s driving your vote, and sound off on ballot measures by tagging us on socials or emailing us at [email protected].

Election Day in New York City is finally here! Tune in to our live coverage throughout the day to get the latest election news from the lens of our art community.

Art historian Clementine Bordeaux shares a Lakota perspective on Mount Rushmore: “For a century, our deep-rooted connection to the Black Hills has been disrupted by this eyesore and those who flock ignorantly and actively to a place that we see as our relative, our grandfather and grandmother.”

John Baldessari once asked his students to defenestrate objects and photograph them mid-air. Five decades later, Nayland Blake shares their own “assignments,” offbeat exercises that might help artists find “a path to the deviations within themselves.”

A survey of 18th-century painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze focuses on his depictions of childhood. Its conclusion is bizarre, consisting of several examples from a series on spoiled innocence, as well as, more explicitly, lost virginity.

Exactly one year after Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun bought Maurizio Cattelan’s cursed banana for $6.2 million, the artist is back at Sotheby’s with “America,” a functional, 18-karat gold toilet. Starting bids are expected at around $10.2 million.

Six artists, including Tania Bruguera and Phil Collins, said they withdrew from a show at Rome’s MAXXI Museum over its “stance on the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

The late sculptor Jackie Ferrara liked to describe herself as a methodical drone, only beginning to build her geometric structures after meticulously plotting them out on graph paper. She planned her death with the same dispassionate logic.

A lawsuit claims that The Met and a Greek foundation should not have acquired a van Gogh painting stolen by the Nazis, and should return the work to the relatives of its rightful owners.

Later in life, Ruth Asawa’s sculptures became fractal, exploding outward rather than tending inward, each branch end begetting ever more. Are they roots or tendrils? Beginnings or ends?

Culture might seem a less consequential right than due process or free assembly. Its infringement by the US government makes less spectacular news than police action or protests. In this way, the repeal of a right that took decades to build is at risk of going unreported.

A corpse flower is blooming in the Bronx, how hip-hop shaped a novelist’s definition of home, protests at the British Museum’s “Pink Ball,” and more in this week’s Required Reading.

Toshiko Takaezu worked tirelessly to build a career in a field dominated by White men. For six decades, she created primarily nonfunctional ceramic forms aligned with the natural world. Many of these vessels are maps of her touch.

In Memoriam this week, we’re honoring Frank Wimberly, an integral part of abstract expressionism; Carla Stellweg, who forged a wider path for Latine artists; Ed Kerns, who attempted to capture an octopus’s consciousness; and more.

After years of staff complaints and high attrition, Gaëtane Verna is no longer the executive director at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Sources alleged that she had a track record of screaming at employees in meetings and lashing out at anyone whose curatorial opinions contrasted with hers.

In this week’s A View From the Easel, artists work amid the background sounds of Manhattan traffic — and the forests of the Andes!

Champagne flutes rattled as The Museum’s grand atrium doors groaned shut. At first, no one noticed. The art world rarely notices when the walls start closing in.

Five times — that’s the number of instances of the word “Antichrist” In the entirety of the New Testament. Shaky scaffolding for such an evocative character with such outsized cultural influence.